Monday, April 1, 2019

Two theories dominate foreign policy thinking. In
principle, balance of powers diplomacy should prevent wars. It should allow
nations to compete fairly in the marketplace without having to compete on the
battlefield. Lurking in the background is its opponent, idealism, the kind that gave us
Woodrow Wilson’s wish to make the world safe for democracy to the Bush
administration freedom agenda to the Obama guilt ridden holier-then-thou weakness agenda.

In a recent paper published by the Hoover Institution Niall Ferguson analyzes the coming conflict between the United States and China in
terms of the difference between balance of powers diplomacy and war. He preferred the former but he now believes that the latter is becoming increasingly
inevitable.

He begins by quoting foreign policy expert Graham Allison:

“When a
rising power threatens to displace a ruling power,” Allison wrote, “alarm bells
should sound: danger ahead. China and the United States are currently on a
collision course… War between the US and China in the decades ahead is not just
possible, but much more likely than currently recognized. Indeed, on the
historical record, war is more likely than not.”

From my perspective, and given that I know far less about
this than the authors cited, I would say that when a ruling power adopts the
habits of cultural decadence it will provoke a rising power to take it over,
or to take what it can get from it.

The United States and Western Europe have
descend into sanctimonious mewling about our sacred democracy and human rights
and the climate apocalypse. China is getting to work. Moreover, as Kai-Fu Lee noted
recently, in the world of technological innovation, in the world of artificial
intelligence. Western Europe has taken itself out of the competitive game…
because it prefers regulation to innovation. This leaves the United States and
China. If the USA continues to promote the regulatory state, it too will take
itself out of the game.

One notes that idealists prefer regulation and do not care if it stifles innovation. They are too proud to fight and too proud to compete. They imagine that once they produce a Heavenly City in their own country, other countries will naturally follow their luminous example.

Ferguson continues:

In Cold
War I, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was the moment
America woke up to the red menace. I am not sure quite what the Chinese Sputnik
moment was—maybe the publication last year of Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and
the New World Order. China-bashing is no longer about unfair trade
policies and the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. The trade war that
Trump launched against China last year has morphed into a tech war over 5G
networks, artificial intelligence, online payments, and even quantum computing.
Of course, there is an old-fashioned arms race going on as well, as China
stocks up on missiles capable of sinking aircraft carriers. But that is not
what is interesting about Cold War II.

Ferguson sees the United States and China as ideologically
divided.

As in
Cold War I, the two superpowers are ideologically divided, with President Xi
Jinping reasserting the importance of Marxism as the foundation of party
ideology even as Trump insists: “America will never be a socialist country.”
And, as in Cold War II, both superpowers are seeking to project their economic
power overseas.

I think it wrong to imagine that China has returned to
Marxism. I believe that Chinese officials are terrified that the
cultural contagion, the cultural toxins that are destroying America will invade
their country.

China happily borrowed the free enterprise system. They
rejected American democracy and human rights and cultural decadence and opioids
and sexual depravity. America is overrun by opioids. China has a long memory. It remembers the opium wars. It executes drug dealers.

It is a choice. It is not a Marxist choice. It is a
prophylactic. When you have the right cultural habits you might fear the
arrival of cultural habits that will undermine your effectiveness, your
efficiency, your productivity and your future.

Ferguson continues that China is much more powerful economically
than the Soviet Union:

So what
are the big differences? First, China is now a match for America in terms of
GDP, whereas the USSR never got close. Second, China and America are
economically intertwined in what I once called “Chimerica,” whereas U.S.-Soviet
trade was minimal.

As Ferguson sees it, America is being torn apart by the
radicals in our midst. He might have mentioned the high tech firms who do
business with China but refuse to work with the Pentagon. He does remark that
America is divided against itself, that an increasing number of Americans are
not loyal to the nation and that more and more of them are promoting crackpot
ideas whose only purpose is to deconstruct it:

My
concern is with those native-born Americans whose antipathy to Trump is leading
them in increasingly strange directions.

The
vogue for socialism among Democratic voters is one sign of the times. According
to a recent Gallup poll, 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents
view socialism positively, as against 47% who view capitalism positively. The
left-wing firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done much to make socialism
sexy on Capitol Hill this year. Even more disturbing, because it is much more
subtle, is the way her fellow Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, of
Minnesota, is making Islamism acceptable. Earlier this year, she and her allies
won a significant victory by turning a resolution intended to condemn Omar’s
recent anti-Semitic remarks into one that also condemned “anti-Muslim
discrimination and bigotry against minorities” and deflected the blame for
those who “weaponize hate” onto “white supremacists.”

Like
her supporters on the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Omar knows that
attacking Israel and accusing its American supporters of dual loyalty is an
easy way to draw progressives to the Islamist side. It is strange that she has
nothing to say about Beijing’s persecution of the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in
Xinjiang province, hundreds of thousands of whom are being held in “vocational
training centres.” In the old Cold War such camps were called the gulag.

So what
if we reran the Cold War and half the country sided with the enemy? It wouldn’t
be the end of history. But it might be the end of liberty.

Being tolerant of Islamist culture is not going to make us a
more formidable competitor. Surely, the Chinese are watching with glee the
antics of AOC and Co. Just as surely, they do not want to see such bad habits enter their culture.

"In Cold War I, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was the moment America woke up to the red menace. "

I don't think that's true at all: America was very concerned about Soviet expansionism from very shortly after the end of WWII...that's why we fought the Korean War and undertook very large defense buildups and programs.

What Sputnik was about was the undermining of the smug belief that while the Soviets may have had a lot of land and a lot of people, we pretty much had a lock on scientific and engineering brilliance. Sort of like the way the Zero fighter changed the perception of the Japanese.

One effect of Sputnik was the direction of large amounts of federal $$ to the public schools, largely for support of science & math education. It was sort of a headfake, if you look at what has become of those schools since.

It is with a certain bitter irony that I notice that the global establishment has spend the last decades blaming conservative white males for all evil and now expects that same cohort to prepare to shed their blood for the interests of the global establishment. Meanwhile neither Putin, Xi or Trump are advocating for replacement levels of immigration into the Netherlands, while the bureaucrats in Brussels are. Nobody I know is the least bit interested to enlist in order to "save Ukraine from Russian aggression", let alone being shipped off to Asia.

China may be a bit brutish in the way it is claiming its place under the sun, but no more so than Western nations used to do until very recently, looking at Libya or Syria here. (As a side note, Brexit will ensure the EUs military capabilities will be weakened beyond parody.)

China is currently playing the long game careful enough to wait until the next feckless coward like Barack Obama is elected while slowly using its Belt and Road initiative to place nations under debt slavery to China (as opposed to debt slavery to the world bank).

The suggestion that islam can compete in any way, shape or form with China is laughable. Muslim nations have squandered their oil wealth without making any structural investments, while exporting internal friction as terrorism.